Benchmarking Large Language Models for Safety Data Extraction

arXiv:2606. 11204v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate extraction of structured information from Safety Data Sheets (SDS) remains challenging in industrial safety due to heterogeneous document formats and the limitations of traditional rule-based methods. This study benchmarks state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) for automated SDS data extraction, comparing text-based and multimodal processing pipelines. We systematically evaluate four models: Gemini 1. 5 Pro, GPT-4o, Claude 3. 7 Sonnet, and Llama 3.

1-70B, across three prompting strategies: zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought. The evaluation framework assessed accuracy, latency, and cost across more than 50,000 extracted data fields. Results show that text-based extraction consistently outperforms multimodal processing across all metrics. Gemini 1. 5 Pro combined with a Chain-of-Thought prompt achieved the highest accuracy (84%), outperforming GPT-4o (81%) and Claude 3. 7 Sonnet (79%).

However, no model surpassed the 90% accuracy threshold commonly required for reliable real-world deployment. These findings indicate that general-purpose LLMs are not yet robust enough for unsupervised industrial use, though performance suggests strong potential with task-specific fine-tuning. Future research should focus on domain-adapted training, model calibration, and the integration of Human-in-the-Loop verification to ensure safety-critical reliability.